Which is more harmful to the teeth: thumbs or the teat?
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A thumb or a pacifier: everyone has their own opinion about it, but which is actually better? Or rather, which is more harmful to your child’s teeth?
As a parent, you naturally want to prevent your child from getting crooked teeth, but it is not that simple. A pacifier does not exist for nothing. In the first instance, the use of a teat has one important purpose: your newborn baby has a great need for sucking. When your baby is one year old, that sucking need has already decreased considerably. In fact, the pacifier would then no longer be necessary. Yet many children still need it: they are used to it. The pacifier has become a habit and provides comfort.
Continuing to use a teat can have serious drawbacks. If older children use a pacifier, the upper jaw can narrow, the palate can be raised or they can get a significant overbite (source: dentalclinics.nl). This in turn can lead to problems in speech development. But unlearn that pacifier? That is not so easy… You can read here how you can best approach this.
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Still, it is better to give your baby a pacifier than to let it thumbs. To appease the need to suck, you can offer a teat so that your child does not reach for his or her thumb. That is in fact much more difficult to unlearn, since that thumb is always nearby… A teat is shaped in such a way that it always remains in the middle of the mouth and cannot exert too much force (source: health.be) . If a child is still thumbing when the adult teeth are (almost) coming through, the thumb exerts a lot of pressure on the teeth and palate. This can permanently change the position of the jaws and teeth in adult teeth. It is therefore very important that your child stops thumbing around his or her sixth year. Here you can read six tips to get rid of thumbs.
Want to know more about your child’s teeth? Here you can read 7 more things that are useful to know about milk teeth.
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